I know it's lame to write a post about the weather... but...

The weather for the past three days has just been notably beautiful. The equinox hit earlier this week and wasn't messing around. New York apparently decided that it was autumn and just went for it.

Absolutely lovely.

Last night, I finished reading Neil Gaiman's new novel Anansi Boys. Quick review: Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors, and this book certainly didn't hurt his standing. It's excellent. The young man can write. (Especially compared to the book that I tried to start reading--The Traveler by a fellow calling himself John Twelve Hawks (yeah right)--which is maybe--just maybe--the single worst 20 pages of a novel I've ever read. My intense, passionate hatred for all things Dan Brown notwithstanding, Mr. Dozen Eagles puts that wannabe to shame. If Brown was hoping to be the most derivative, bland, boring, vapid writer of all time, he's going to have to step up his efforts.

See, the moment Dan Brown even comes into my head I get all off-topic. Deep breath.

I decided, after finishing the last chapter of Anansi Boys, that I would very much like to meet Mr. Gaiman and tell him that he kicks large amounts of behind. I went to his website to see if he was touring, and lo and behold!

He was in New York last Tuesday. And I missed him. Grr.

It turns out that he's going to be doing a signing at the Vroman's on Colorado Blvd. in my ol' stomping grounds of Pasadena, CA. I called my sister-in-law (who is also a huge Gaiman fan) to tell her that she should go say hello. Jenn told me that I was welcome to overnight-mail her something, so that she could ask him to sign it for me.

Which got me thinking.

I have very few signed things. Neal Stephenson signed my copy of Snow Crash. My father got me an autographed Edgerrin James mini football helmet for my birthday this year. Umm... my crazy, psycho, batshit ex-girlfriend gave me a "signed" copy of Oliver Stone's film Platoon on DVD that she quite obviously (in retrospect) did herself with a black magic marker. (Let's just say the markings on the box look nothing like his real signature.) I think that about does it for autographed possessions.

Why do we get things signed? Well, in the case of the football helmet, it's because the value appreciates significantly (stop me if I'm wrong, Josh). Without the signature, it's a little kitschy piece of plastic. With the signature, it's an item collectors are willing to shell out cash for. But for a book... does the value go up? If so, I don't think I care, because I don't want to sell my Gaiman books. They're my books you know?

I got Snow Crash signed, because I waited in line at a book signing table, and the author looked at me expectantly, and I thought that maybe he would have thought it was weird that I stood in line just to say "hello" (probably Neal Stephenson encounters twenty people weirder than me before breakfast everyday). But, in truth, I just wanted to meet him-- to tell him that I really enjoyed his books. The fact that he added his name in pen to a book in which his name appears already on the cover, the spine, the back cover, the title page, the copyright page &c. really doesn't make a difference to me. It's not even a good reminder that I met him; I'd remember just as well whether or not he had scribbled in my book.

So, I'm not planning on reselling any of my Neil Gaiman books. My Sandman comics are all late-editions. My novels are not in particularly good shape. I do have a first edition hardcover of Endless Nights still shrink-wrapped... which I wouldn't mind him scribbling in... but if I weren't there to tell him how happy it makes me to read his books, it would be the same thing as that psycho-ex-hose-beast doing it with a marker. I still wouldn't have had a chance to tell him that I appreciate him.

For me, the author's signature is already on the page, and the additional signing is just something expected of me for having stood in line for so long.

I worry that this could seem like I'm mocking people who do want to have things signed. No no no no no. It makes sense, it's just not something that *I* get down with. For some people, I'm sure, signatures are a tangible reminder of a great experience or a great encounter. Or a way to have a piece that hasn't been mass-produced, but has been written in his own hand (even if it's just his name, illegibly). But all that an autograph in a book proves to me is that someone somewhere met an author. Which is not terribly satisfying.

Thank you sooooo much Jenn for offering to take a book for me to have Mr. Gaiman sign. But I think I'm going to wait until his next tour so that I can shake his hand in person and tell him that he has improved my life with his words.

My friend Morgan D.S. Murphey is in charge of space requests at my school, and I enjoy filling out false space requests for her amusement. On the most recent one, I claimed that my show was called "On A Lemon Yellow Morning I Awoke to Chocolate Words."

She liked this line very much. So I wrote a poem using that as the first line, so that she could see where it went in my mind. It went something like this:

*****
On a lemon yellow morning I awoke to chocolate words.
Or expected to, but found false dreams had clouded all my thoughts.
The morning wasn't yellow and my words were all for naught.
Blue electric storms above me sliced the sky in thirds.
With a purple-tonguéd whisper, I tried pleading with the sky.
But the day was green and gray by then, and mocked me, by and by.
*****

This has been Random Bits of Poetry with Dave McGee.

Yesterday, I finished reading Number9Dream by David Mitchell.

Wow wow wow and once again wow.

This novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and is now shortlisted in Dave McGee's most favorite books of all time. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.

Wow.

This has been Vague but Passionate Book Reviews with Dave McGee

Amazon.com has a bunch of new features. They list a text's "Statistically Improbably Phrases" (very funny), and have stuff like "Average Syllables per Word" and "Words per Dollar." All of this stuff is tres cool. But the one that I like best is called Concordance.

Concordance finds the 100 most used words in a book (excluding incredibly common words such as "the" and "an") and lists them in alphabetical order, with each individual word's font size denoting how often it's used. Tons of fun, in my opinion. While browsing through some concordances, I came across this one, from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness." And I'll be damned if that doesn't read like one exceptionally beautiful poem. Just really quite lovely.

So there's your bit of post-modern poetry for the day: an alphabetical list of common words from a philosophy textbook. (Seriously, you should read it. It's beautiful.)

I've built up somewhat of a reputation for accumulating a lot of loose change. It used to cover every available flat surface in my home or dorm room; small piles of coins were evidence that I had recently been in a room. My sister-in-law once picked up all the loose change in my bedroom in California and it added up to $40, which she used to buy paint supplies to make the room look nicer.

Well, due to tight finances, I decided another change-in (ha!) might be in order. This morning, I loaded all of my coins into a plastic bag, making my backpack quite a bit heavier. I traded them in at a free coin counter at a local bank, guessing that I may have had $12 or even $15 or possibly even $20 in coins.

Umm, way off.

I'm $52 richer.